The 2021 Design Canberra theme of transformation is a fitting one for festival designer-in-residence, Canberra-based artist and educator, Lucy Irvine.
Irvine said transformation is a “really meaty theme” for her given the nature of her work, her use of materials, and the direction her practice has evolved throughout her career.
“The different kinds of weaving I’ve developed over the last 20 years now completely interrogate and inform my way of thinking, my way of learning and my way of seeing the world,” she said.
Irvine’s thoughtful and considered response to the festival theme comes in the form of her commissioned signature artwork, The Stills, which will be the focal point of a Craft ACT exhibition for the duration of the festival.
The way the work has been created embodies the theme; Irvine picked out two silicone moulds used to create a recent public art commission and reimagined them through her creative process.
Initially, she poured wax into those sections “over and over again”, each time producing a slightly different result.
The sections were then cast in bronze; the final product features 50 pieces, 49 displayed in a seven-by-seven grid, and one on its own.
“Each of these is an interesting form, you also get the sense of them potentially being fragments of something else,” she said.
“In a grid, they begin to suggest there’s some kind of secondary order or vague secondary pattern that holds the whole thing together.”
Irvine said her use of repetition and pattern forming shows the “iterative process of transformation”.
“I’ve been extremely busy the last few years and wanted this to be an opportunity to revisit old work and find a rhythm in terms of the processes I use,” she said.
Design Canberra appointment ‘almost too neat’
Running 8-28 November, other duties Irvine will take on throughout Design Canberra include the creation of a large-scale installation at The Cutting next to Lake Burley Griffin. Additionally she will run a workshop, and present an artist’s talk about her exhibition.
Alongside the festival, several other occasions will culminate for her in November.
Running concurrently with the festival will be Irvine’s solo exhibition at Thor’s Hammer that will be the culmination of her PhD research, titled emergent knowledge practices.
“It’s this idea of not working to a predetermined plan but have a series of parameters that you’re responding to and the thing therefore coming into being,” she said.
Irvine said it’s a “wonderful end point” for her PhD research to be part of Design Canberra given her famous 2017 Design Canberra work, Surface Strategies, was completed in the infancy of her PhD.
“As much as I love the thought of transformation being this ongoing process, we are mindful of, there’s a series of really nice end points coming together here as well,” she smiles.
“To have that culminate as part of Design Canberra is almost too neat, but in a fantastic kind of way.”
The Scottish-born artist, who moved to Australia in 2003, has lived in Canberra for the past five years.
Irvine has mixed feelings about our the planned city, but ultimately regards it as a place of “so much potential”.
“I appreciate that in Canberra you get sections in which you can feel a whole vision and that’s a really interesting thing to encounter and a really good and powerful thing to experience.”
She lamented, however, the lack of visibility regarding the creative goings-on around town.
“From living here for a while now there are fantastic communities, fantastic artists and creative people,” she said. “We need places in which there’s more visibility of that and not flittering away to the suburbs in that regard.
“For people when they visit the city, it would be so fantastic to have a clearer sense of what’s actually happening here, because it’s not always easy to find.”
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